Labor Planning and Automation in a 3PL Environment

Labor-intensive operations are the accepted trade-off for flexibility and immediacy in the concurrent storage, management and handling of multiple customers’ goods in third-party logistics warehouses. As such, they represent the 3PL provider’s largest controllable expense — as much as 70 percent of the overall cost of operations. This being the case, for a 3PL operation to continue serving its customers effectively while satisfying its own organic requirements for a fair profit, it must deploy its labor resources methodically and carefully account for them in terms of their contributions to revenue, profit and customer satisfaction.

This white paper discusses ways for 3PL providers to manage revenue with full control of pricing, rating, activity-based costing, time-dependent events, invoicing and metrics tracking.